CAN SUCH THINGS BE
Meseemed that while she played, while lightly yet
Her fingers fell, as roses bloom by bloom,
I listened—dead within a mighty room
Of some old palace where great casements let
Gaunt moonlight in, that glimpsed a parapet
Of statued marble: in the arrased gloom
Majestic pictures towered, dim as doom,
The dreams of Titian and of Tintoret.
And then, it seemed, along a corridor,
A mile of oak, a stricken footstep came,
Hurrying, yet slow.... I thought long centuries
Passed ere she entered—she, I loved of yore,
For whom I died, who wildly wailed my name
And bent and kissed me on the mouth and eyes.
KNIGHT-ERRANT
Onward he gallops through enchanted gloom.—
The phantoms of the forest, dark and dim,
And shadows of vast death environ him—
Onward he spurs victorious over doom.
Before his eyes that love’s far fires illume—
Where courage sits, impregnable and grim—
The form and features of her beauty swim,
Beckoning him on with looks that fears consume.
The thought of her distress, her lips to kiss,
Mails him in triple might; and so at last
To Lust’s huge keep he comes; its giant wall,
Wild-towering, frowning from the precipice:
And through its gate, borne like a bugle-blast,
O’er night and hell he thunders to his all.
THE ARTIST
In story books, when I was very young,
I knew her first, one of the Fairy Race;
And then it was her picture took its place,
Framed round with love’s deep gold, and draped and hung
High in my heart’s red room: no song was sung,
No tale of passion told, I did not grace
With her associated form and face,
And intimated charm of touch and tongue.
As years went on she grew to more and more,
Until each thing, symbolic to my heart
Of beauty,—such as honor, truth, and fame,—
Within the studio of my soul’s thought wore
Her lineaments, whom I, with all my art,
Strove to embody and to give a name.